Earth Blastron, where the robots killed their human creators, got bored, and decided to start killing each other. In this war of ennui, you'll take control of a young robot eager to start tallying his takedowns, but will you tire of automaton on automaton violence faster than these robots grew weary of prolicide?">

Blastron Review

The
Good

Tried and true gameplay. Points for style. Free, with lots of theoretical value in multiplayer.

The
Bad

Players put off by microtransactions will walk. A real narrative would have been welcome. AI issues.

Like Worms, but with microtransactions.

Welcome to EarthBlastron, where the robots killed their human creators, got bored, and decided to start killing each other. In this war of ennui, you’ll take control of a young robot eager to start tallying his takedowns, but will you tire of automaton on automaton violence faster than these robots grew weary of prolicide?

Blastron has endearing style but little in the way of characterization, and certainly no narrative to write home about. That said, the game’s attempts at humor, while frequently flat, still rise far above the average App Store peer. “Yolobot” is a funny name for a boss enemy, unless he beats you a couple times, and the first time a hand grenade lands in your helpless robot’s mouth, you’ll chuckle lightly at the very least.

There’s no escaping it, Blastron is basically Worms, though it might be more fair to say that Blastron is in the Worms genre. Gameplay is broken down into time-based turns, characters move painfully slow, terrain is destructible, weapon variety is the bread and butter, and physics and bouncy projectiles make happy or not so happy accidents the order of the day. If you like Worms you’ll probably like Blastron, but Blastron doesn’t really improve the Worms formula in any significant way.

Blastronis free, but it’s also filthy with microtransactions. You don’t start a round with a base set of weapons and ammunition: you start with what’s in your inventory. You’ll probably be able to keep yourself locked and loaded with the points you earn in-game, but if not, you’re gonna pay. Victory is determined by kills or score, the latter of which is mostly calculated by the damage you do. As you can probably guess, better weapons rack up more kills and more damage (and are just more fun to play with), and those better weapons cost more points, or more dollars. Regardless of whatever negative feelings you may have about this sort of system, the pop-ups related to it are both frequent and intrusive.

Blastron features both a campaign and online multiplayer component, but the former is just playing the latter with bots. As it turns out, your little robot cannot maneuver over even a centimeter of raised terrain without jumping (which is mapped to pressing up on a virtual stick), and that limitation will frequently render the AI broken for multiple turns or even an entire match. Throw in things like trampolines and you can basically just sit back and watch your computer opponents pinball around getting hit by level traps over and over. Even with those sorts of glitches, many players will prefer going campaign-only, rather than be out-inventoried by another human.

Blastron is in every way a competent Worms-style battle that translates well to touch screens and does more than most games on the style front. If you’ve got a strong stomach for microtransactions and a hefty appetite for physics-based humor, then open wide to catch this hand grenade between your teeth.